Raid Composition

I made this exact post on my guild fourms, but sadly not many people really read it. I was hoping to get some feedback from you guys. Specifically, i suggest switching out classes mid fight and having priests assigned groups to heal, not their own, how viable is this? All comments are greatly appreciated. here is my post:

Note: This was after a Vael fight so maybe the groups weren't the best they could have been because of that, so don't take this personally. I just want to throw out ideas on how to make the raid more efficient for the majority of fights. Obviously when Csorba needs 2 tremor totems, or we are fighting vael and we need a priest in every group, my ideas wont apply.

Regardless of whether this is the most efficient spread of classes isn't what I'll be talking about, but instead on how to best create groups based on what was available.

All these groups could use a little rework, I'll try and lay out my set of ideas for raid groups, and try to describe why i selected them.

Melee DPS Group 1: Rogue Rogue Rogue Shaman Warrior

Melee DPS Group 2: Rogue Rogue Warrior Shaman Warrior (rogue would be better, but only 5)

Reason why these are the best groups for warriors / rogues alike. Rogues/ warriors benefit from windfury and str totems. Rogues shouldn't poison their mainhand as windfury doesn't stack. windfury scales with weapons so it is better than poisons for damage. str totems gives warriors 2ap per str and 1ap for rogues, thats increased dps right there. Warriors give battleshout to rogues/warriors, thats increased ap. All this adds to more ap, more dps, quicker kills, less healing, faster instance clears. The shaman doesn't necessarily have to just heal his group, he can be assigned to heal some other group, or maybe he can just heal his own group depending on the fight.

Hunter DPS group: hunter hunter hunter hunter shaman

hunters give trueshot aura to all other hunters, and hunters mooch off each others furioius howls. shaman gives grace of air to hunters for 2rap per agi point as well. I'd like to make 2 groups of hunters and do 3/3 spread but this current group has lack of shamans, so i can't.

Caster dps group 1: mage mage mage mage shaman

Caster dps group 2: mage warlock warlock druid mage

shaman give tranquil air to the mages, who don't really have any aggro reducers on their hardest hitting spells. missles sux for damage, we need to stop gimping their dps. If the mages are pushing the aggro meter without pulling aggro, the tranquil air totem will in effect increase their dps by 20%. 4 mages with increased 20% damage is almost equal to one whole other mage in the raid. Notice group 2 is lacking a shaman, ( i subbed in a druid, this is not efficient at all, but theres nothing i can do with this specific group setup. thing to note: druids don't give ANYTHING to the raid(in forms of buffs), nor do they really need anything, except maybe a tranquil air. so putting a druid here doesn't hurt him at all) personally id love to give them a shaman, but we only have 5 shaman, so i have to save one for the tank group. warlocks if specced demonolgy have reduced threat so having them without a shaman isn't too big of a deal if they have the right pet out.

so far 25 people are accounted for, leaving me with 3 more groups. we have left:

1 druid 1 warlock 1 shaman 2 hunters 4 warriors 6 priests

total left, 15

priest group: priest priest priest priest priest

why all priests. cuz when these priests need mana tide, u swap the highest mana priest out for a shaman, he drops the tide, and then when thats over with, u swap em back. the way groups our set up now, priests are only really getting the mana tide from the shaman in their group. this way priests can get up to 4 to 5 mana tides each, and i highly doubt that would ever need to happen. thats alot of efficiency. assign each of these priests to heal a certain group while fighting trash. and if it's a boss fight, well tsu usually assigns whos healing who anyway, so thats not a problem. we all have ctraid, i think we should be using it to it's full advantages.

tank group: warrior warrior shaman warlock priest

main tank here, prolly csorba. other warrior can be the off tank or any other tank it doesn't matter him being here except to give battle shout so csorba can use his rage on more important things. shaman gives str totem and wind totems and resist totems. warlock gives imp. priest is here just to heal main tank, doesn't matter that hes here or not, just convienent.

last group, this group is just the leftovers, sorry warrior warrior hunter hunter druid

like i said, this is just left overs. nothing i could do here. the only synergy here is warriors getting trueshot, and warriors giving each other battle shout. notice battle shout doesn't help hunters RANGED attack power, so its worthless.

So this is how i would set up my raid if i had the power, what do you guys think? heres what i think:

pros: dps will increase dramatically. with that comes faster clear times, less deaths, less repair costs, etc. lets face it, there are lots of pros.

cons: have to think a little to make these groups, not everyone will be happy ie. the leftovers group. priests will have to pay more attention (maybe) but not really. they are assigned a group to heal, not their own.

Is the base for most of our melee groups. It dates back to when you needed to be in someone's group to PW:S them, but even so, there's still PoH. Stacking a "healer group" never made any sense to me; plus since we don't have mana tide, there's no reason to waste a shaman on a bunch of priests and such.

Here's a somewhat typical group setup, with a fairly melee-heavy raid:

We only have two-three shamans with Mana Tide as well. So those are usually in the healing group. Not like it's really needed with the current healer gear level and the efficiency of heal rank 1/2 spam, but it's nice. Mana Spring isn't aweful either, it helps when you're spamming all you can on easy encounters to top (over)healing done!

Part of why I don't like healer groups is that ultimately, healers have a primary responsibility to keep their own groups up. In a 2-warrior group, I won't assign one to tank one mob on one side of the room and the other to the other side of the room. Healers keep track of their groupmates, and while there's tons of crosshealing, there is always at least one person who is in range of you to heal you if it's needed. It just simplifies organization.

There are certainly fights where I'll change that up for specific purposes, but our default raid configuration generally looks like what you see above.

Yeah we've started doing "heal your group" strategy on some bosses in AQ40. All through BWL and MC we've had healing groups with mana tide shamans in it, but on at least Sartura, Fankriss, Huhuran and C'thun we spread healers around (and for Viscidus, duh. Not tried Ouro yet, so I wouldn't know there), and you heal your own group.

EDIT: On Fankriss it's more like heal the dps warrior in your group (We have a dpswarrior kill the small spawns).

We rarely raid without 8 shamans so pretty much every group gets totems. Sucks when plate and cloth are dropping hand over fist but it's hard to argue with in terms of effectiveness. Shamans are the Bards of WoW :/

If using 'u' and other abreviations dumbs down my post that bad in your eyes then well, I'm sorry. After typing out such an epic post I get lazy half way through it and start typing like I do on aim. :P

Thanks to all those that helped though. I'm not a healer, so I wasn't sure how viable it was to be assigned groups. I liked the raid setup that was shown above, and it allows for healers to keep track of their own group while still maintaining a lot of synergy in groups.

We rarely raid without 8 shamans so pretty much every group gets totems. Sucks when plate and cloth are dropping hand over fist but it's hard to argue with in terms of effectiveness. Shamans are the Bards of WoW :/

That makes so much sense, and I never thought about it that way. Thanks :)

Of course we don't get tempted to stack groups to maximize totem use, but I've always preferred self sustained groups like Gurg says. It's more intuitive for the healers, and makes for a more universal setup.

Of course we don't get tempted to stack groups to maximize totem use, but I've always preferred self sustained groups like Gurg says. It's more intuitive for the healers, and makes for a more universal setup.

It really is a no-brainer for alliance though, since you don't have to worry about who's getting totems :) I would see having a healer in each group as more efficient too, if we didn't have to be in the same group as a shaman to get his buffs :(

We rarely raid without 8 shamans so pretty much every group gets totems. Sucks when plate and cloth are dropping hand over fist but it's hard to argue with in terms of effectiveness. Shamans are the Bards of WoW :/

That makes so much sense, and I never thought about it that way. Thanks :)

This is one of those things that looks better on paper than it tends to work out in the long run. Honestly, it drives me crazy. There is no denying that having totems in every group improves everyone in the raid, but having 8 of the same class in every raid means you need a pretty big bench unless you have super hardcore players. As a result we have shamans with a ton of DKP still wearing blues because mail doesn't get the drop quantity that say, cloth classes do due to the paladin/shaman divide. I really hope they improve stackability of Shamans in the revamp somehow. Coming from an EQ Shaman where more than 1 Shaman on a raid was generally useless going to 20% of your raid makeup being Shamans is almost comical.

Gurg, I have a question for you, and I know it's been covered to an extent in the past. How do you handle raid spots? Do you prioritize for a balanced group?

Somewhat. I usually aim for something like 6/5/5/5/5/5/5/4 with 6 warriors and 4 warlocks, but I'll skew that depending on signups. If we have 9 rogues who want to go and only 5 hunters, I'm not going to put all 5 hunters in while 4 rogues are forced to sit out. I'll probabably have 6 rogues and 4 hunters, for example.